The New Family Ideal for Korean Black Adoption

Many of the African American non-military families that adopted Korean black children did not conform to the gender and race conventions that child welfare officials desired in adoptive families. Often, these families included wives that worked, and would continue to work, outside of their homes even after they adopted a Korean black child. A number of these adoptive families were also interracial couples or they lived in interracial neighborhoods. Adoptive families that included interracial couples and working wives forced some social workers and child welfare officials to reframe these family patterns as ideal for Korean black children. The reforms that some social workers made to increase adoptions of Korean black children by African American and interracial couples also informed their responses to the small number of white families that adopted Korean black children. Agencies affiliated with International Social Service frequently emphasized the international political implications of Korean transnational adoptions because they understood transracial and transnational adoptions to be liberal and antiracist endeavors. However, many of the African American and interracial families that pursued transnational adoptions did not base their adoptions on political motives. Instead, they imagined a kinship with Korean black children because of the racism the encountered in Korea.

Introduction

The introduction provides a brief history of the development of US domestic adoption, and African Americans’ roles in US and transnational adoption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the professionalization of adoption in the United States largely evolved around the needs of birth mothers, children, and adoptive parents who were white, African Americans’ efforts to care for orphaned and displaced children through formal and informal adoptions has been underappreciated. The introduction describes the ways African Americans adopted children in the United States and, after World War II, foreign-born children of African American soldiers. This approach provides a foundation for understanding how African Americans’ participation in Korean transnational adoption was similar to their domestic adoption efforts and their efforts to adopt World War II GI children. It also suggests reasons why efforts to increase the professionalization and standardization of Korean transnational adoption reduced African Americans’ participation in this method of adoptive family formation.

Conclusion

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Korean transnational adoption would evolve to place more full Korean than mixed-race Korean children with families in Western nations. This shift was a consequence of political, social, economic, and cultural changes in South Korea and the United States that altered adoption priorities in both nations. As Western nations invested more money in orphanages and facilities to care for displaced, poor, and orphaned Korean children in South Korea, the Korean government embraced transnational adoption as an economic and social welfare solution. This transition helped to make invisible the struggles of Korea’s mixed-race populations and the vulnerable Korean women who became entangled in military prostitution. International media scrutiny has brought attention to the tragic circumstances that shape the lives of mixed-race Koreans and the Korean women who continue to relinquish their children for adoption. Events like the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and the return of Korean black NFL football player Hines Ward Jr. to Seoul after he received the Super Bowl MVP in 2006 have forced Korean political leaders to reckon with the historical legacies of gender and racial oppression that have contributed to the marginalization of these populations.

African American Families, Korean Black Children, and the Evolution of Transnational Race Rescue

In the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, African American soldiers’ families became a significant pool of adoptive families for Korean black children. Although child welfare officials had considered military families less than ideal adopters, black soldiers’ families enjoyed economic and social benefits that set them apart from many African American non-military families interested in adopting. A soldier’s affiliation with the military allowed some to conform to the gender conventions that appealed to child welfare officials. While a military salary could be meager, soldiers’ access to benefits like base housing and the Post Exchange made it possible for some to function as primary breadwinners and their wives to devote themselves to caregiving. Child welfare officials with organizations including International Social Service devised efforts to increase adoptions of Korean black children by African American soldiers’ families, and especially the families stationed in Japan. These efforts evolved as US military and political officials, Korean political officials, and representatives of sectarian and nonsectarian aid agencies, attempted to devise strategies to care for Korea’s mixed-race children.

The National Urban League and the Fight for US Adoption Reform

The National Urban League initiated its Foster Care and Adoption Project in 1953 to increase African Americans’ participation in formal adoptions. League officials encouraged reforms in US policies and practices to eliminate the economic and social obatacles that limited African Americans’ adoptions. League officials also promoted greater integration of adoption agencies’ administrative and social work staff to advance the organization’s goals of encouraging interracial cooperation in social service agencies. The outcomes of the national project were inconsistent, in part because of resistance from some white child welfare professionals and the organized efforts of white citizens’ councils to defraud and defund many League branches. The project did highlight the social and institutional barriers that affected African Americans’ domestic and transnational adoptions. This chapter foregrounds the challenges adoption agencies faced when they endeavoured to placed Korean black children with African American families. It reveals why many successful agencies had to implement, on a case-by-case basis, many of the reforms that the League had hoped would produce national, comprehensive adoption reform.

Pearl S. Buck and the Institutional and Rhetorical Reframing of US and Korean Adoption

In 1949, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winning author Pearl S. Buck established Welcome House, the first permanent foster home and adoption agency for mixed-race children of Asian descent born in the United States. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Buck innovated an institutional model and rhetorical strategy to increase adoptions of US-born and foreign-born mixed-race children of Asian descent. Buck’s strategies were controversial because they represented a break from adoption standards that child welfare professionals devised to promote the best interest of adoptees. Professionals associated with the US Children’s Bureau, the Child Welfare League of America, and International Social Service were critical of Buck’s adoption work and her support of proxy adoptions. But white adoptive families responded to her reframing of mixed-race children as beautiful and intellectually superior hybrids that were model adoptees. Yet, Buck’s efforts to increase African Americans’ adoptions of Korean black children were less effective. Her awareness that transnational adoption would not be a solution for many mixed-race Korean children, and especially Korean black children, led Buck to establish the Pearl S. Buck Foundation and an opportunity center in South Korea to assist mixed-race children and their mothers.

African American Soldiers and the Origins of Korean Transnational Adoption

African American soldiers took part in the child-centered humanitarian efforts that developed during the Korean War. The efforts that all soldiers made to provide food, clothing, shelter, and educations for Korean children displaced or orphaned by the war received considerable political and media attention. The black press mobilized the stories of black soldiers caring for Korean children to advance the fight for African Americans’ civil rights in the military and throughout US society. However, African American soldiers’ social and sexual relationships with Korean women revealed the ways that many black men exploited vulnerable women in war-torn countries. The children born as a result of these relationships faced punishing exclusions and ostracism because of US and Korean race and gender hierarchies that restricted the legal and social status of black men and the Korean women who associated with soldiers. These ideas would influence the development of Korean transnational adoption and African Americans’ participation in this method of family formation.